She had the heater in the old Chevy cranked on high, but still she shivered, unable to shake the horrible feeling that she had abandoned her only son to a pack of hungry wolves. But what could she have done? Call out from the top of the fire ladder? I'm here! Come get me, I'm here! She was free to help Aaron, now, and that was a good thing a at least that's what she kept telling herself.

But she had no clue where to begin. Tom's murder was nothing more than a burglary that had gone horribly wrong. She had no idea that the gunman had intended to kill Aaron.

She glanced at the cell phone lying on the seat next to her and recalled that special moment when Aaron had given it to her. How strong and courageous he had been. How grown up. She questioned her decision to follow his orders not to call the police, and wondered if she would ever see him again.

Suddenly an idea occurred to her that might have seemed obvious under normal circ.u.mstances. She picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and called her son.

Souther was alone in his office when Aaron's cell phone rang. He saw the word MOM displayed on the screen.

"h.e.l.lo, Ashley," he said, in a cruelly relaxed voice. "My name is Johnny Souther. I have your son."

"Oh my G.o.d ..." she thought, a sharp pang of horror sweeping through her. She swerved hard left to avoid sliding off the dark highway.

"Listen carefully," Souther said.

"Where's Aaron? I want to see my son."

"Aaron is unharmed."

Ashley closed her eyes and thanked G.o.d for small miracles.

"I want you to listen for a moment," Souther said. "Can you do that?"

Ashley gripped the steering wheel tightly and tried to collect herself. This man had just gunned down her husband in cold blood and he was no doubt planning a similar fate for her and her son.

"Your son's in a safe place," Souther said, "and he'll remain safe as long as you do exactly as I say. Do you understand?""

Ashley began to weep. "Yes," she said.

"Did you call the police?"

No."

"Good," Souther said. "Let's keep it that way. If you call the cops, your son's dead."

Ashley took in a quick breath. That was the first time she'd heard those dreaded words spoken out loud.

"Do you have money for a motel?" Souther said.

Ashley paused, then replied, "Yes."

"Okay. I want you to get a room and stay there. Do you understand?"

She wanted to ask, Why the room? Why not take me now? but didn't. "I understand," she said.

"I have some business to attend to," Souther said. "Your son will be safe until I return a unless, of course, someone does something stupid while I'm gone. I'll contact you with further instructions."

"What do you want from us?" Ashley cried. But the call was dead.

Needles's phone rang, and he picked up.

"I just got a call from Ashley Quinn," Souther said.

"Oh, really ..." Needles said, surprised, but interested.

"Any leads?"

"Someone saw her out on the old highway," Needles said. "We'll have her soon enough."

"Good," Souther said, "but swing by my office first. I want to have a little fun with her."

Needles hung up and set his phone aside. He wasn't sure what Souther meant by that (and it was a long drive back to the cannery), but having fun with a beautiful woman always sounded good to him a and orders were orders.

"Hold on, Beeks," he said. Then he reached for the hand brake and to the big man's dismay, pulled a violent E-brake U-turn in the middle of the highway and headed the van back toward the city, leaving a curling wake of white smoke trailing behind them.

Chapter 21.

Sands Motel Emerging from the gloom, beyond the reach of her headlights, Ashley could see a large, brightly lit sign in the shape of a palm tree. As she drew nearer she was able to make out the words SANDS MOTEL, and soon the word VACANCY floated into view. She eased off the gas, crossed over the centerline, and pulled into the narrow driveway a gripping the steering wheel tightly as her Chevy rocked and splashed through pothole craters blown out of the asphalt by the parade of eighteen-wheelers from the motel's glory days.

She had hoped for something a little nicer than a moribund hovel, but this was the first sign of life since the old man's gas station several miles back, and being unfamiliar with the area, she wasn't certain there were any other motels a or that she could afford a better one if she found one. Besides, the lights were on and she was too exhausted to drive.

The motel was a squat, flat-roofed, lagoon-green and tangerine affair with little palm trees cut out of fake window shutters. Ashley guessed that the owners were going for the Florida Keys look, but had failed miserably.

The office sat to the right of a lattice-covered breezeway furnished with a half-dozen plastic lounge chairs and a ping-pong table that sagged pathetically under its own waterlogged weight. Jutting off to the left, a wing of seven small guest rooms, each with its false-louver door flaking a different color of paint from a pastel palette. Ashley parked the car, shut off the engine, and stepped out into the weather.

The rain-charged wind cut through her paper-thin robe and nightgown as though she were naked. She clutched her robe to her throat and hopped quickly toward the glowing OFFICE sign, pausing briefly under the covered porch to look back across the parking lot and down the old highway beyond. Then she opened the door and stepped inside.

The office interior looked like a nineteenth-century seance parlor, and along with the ta.s.seled draperies and woven rugs, Ashley half expected to see a crystal ball, or a flying trumpet, or maybe a rattling tambourine circling the naked light bulb jutting from the dark wooden ceiling. She wrinkled her nose at the strong odor of wet dog and presumed that the source of the smell was curled up behind the tattered royal-blue-velvet curtain hanging behind the counter.

It was quiet in the parlor. Ashley's head throbbed as if someone had grabbed her heart and shoved it up behind her eyes. She banged the push bell and thought she'd been caught in a cathedral belfry at noon bells.

She waited, but no one came. So she pressed her fingers against her temples and called out. "h.e.l.lo? Is anyone there?"

Nothing.

She braced herself and tried the push bell again.

More pain, but still no response.

A clock on the mantelpiece read 11:45 p.m. Ashley sighed, and then cold, wet, exhausted (and now annoyed), she turned to leave.

Suddenly, from behind her, a voice croaked, "May I help you?"

Ashley whirled around with a hand over her heart. An odd little man appeared from behind the blue curtain looking like he'd been awakened from a five-year coma. His print pajamas and tousled comb-over fit the decor, as if he had used them for design ideas when he decorated the place a couple of centuries earlier.

Ashley paused to recover her breath. "You scared me," she said.

A light cloud of dust from the curtain followed the man as he stepped up to the counter, and Ashley noticed that his chin barely cleared the Formica top. He squinted in the light and picked small clumps of sleep from the corners of his puffy eyes.

"May I help you?" he repeated, then yawned deeply and rubbed his stubby nose with his thumb.

"Uh, yes a h.e.l.lo," Ashley said, with nervous formality. "I-I'd like a room please. Do you have a vacancy?" She could only see the man's head, now, but she could smell the rest of him. That was no dog behind the curtain, she thought, stepping back slightly.

Out of habit the little man checked the board. Each bra.s.s cup-hook held its key. He coughed once to clear his throat.

"I've got an available single," he said, then looked back at her. "If that'll do, that is ..."

"It will do," Ashley replied, feeling a pinch of relief. She pictured a clean room and fresh sheets and started to relax. "I don't know how long I'll be a"

"It don't matter," the man said, interrupting her as he pushed the registration book forward. "It's pay as you leave." He pointed to a line on the page. "Sign here."

Ashley picked up the pen then hesitated. She signed the name Arlene Finney then laid the pen on the book and pushed it back.

The little man read her entry. "Arleeene ..." he said, stretching out the second syllable for no apparent reason before putting out his hand. "My name's Mars a Douglas Mars. Friends call me Doolin."

What friends? Ashley wondered, finding it hard to imagine him having any. She reluctantly shook Doolin's pudgy hand then wiped hers on her robe while trying not to make a face. Like gripping a warm toad, she thought, disgusted.

"You from around here ... Arlene?" Doolin asked, p.r.o.nouncing her pseudonym correctly, now a if not a bit suspiciously.

Ashley felt a growing unease. "Actually, I'm from a out of town." She had started to say, I'm from another planet, for that's certainly how she felt.

"We don't get many visitors these days," Doolin said. "Not since the freeway bypa.s.s, anyways."

Ashley hadn't heard that old cliche in years and never outside of a movie theater. But thinking about it made her head hurt and she grew impatient. "Could I just have my key, please?"

Doolin held up his hands in self-defense. "Just tryin' to be neighborly," he said. He turned and unhooked a key from the board, then tossed it on the counter. "Room 107. It's on the end past the ice machine. Nice and private."

Private from whom? Ashley wondered as she stared at the key and began to have serious second thoughts.

"I think maybe a uh ..." She paused, then told herself, You're here, okay? Stop being a baby and make the best of it. The quality of her lodging was, after all, the least of her worries.

"Room 107 will be fine," she said at last. She picked up the key then paused. "You wouldn't happen to have a vending machine, or somewhere I can get something to eat, would you?"

"Sorry," Doolin replied. "There's a coffee shop a few miles a"

"Oh, I don't a I mean, I'd rather stay in tonight," Ashley said, reminding herself not to let her stomach speak for her in the future. She turned and started out the door.

"By chance is there somebody lookin' for you, Miss Arlene?" Doolin asked, his voice taking on the air of a small-town deputy sheriff.

Ashley stopped, shocked by the question, and turned to face him. "No, of course not," she replied, trying to maintain a casual confidence in her voice. "W-why would you ask such a thing?"

Doolin stared at Ashley's bruised eye; then his eyes moved slowly down over her perfect body. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "You just seem a little ... tight."

Ashley's eyes followed Doolin's and she nearly screamed when she saw that her rain-soaked nightwear had become see-through, and that the cold had had its stimulating effect. She stepped back in horror and crossed her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"I have to go," she said, face flushed. Then she turned and hurried out the door.

"Ring the bell if you need anything," Doolin said after her. "Just ring the bell ..."

He copped a last look before Ashley slammed the door behind her. Then he closed the registration book and smiled.

Chapter 22.

Room 107 Rain continued to fall as Ashley limped painfully across the empty parking lot to her Chevy. She looked around then opened the car door and climbed into the driver's seat.

She shut the door and sat for a while with her hands resting on the wheel. Rain drummed the roof and splashed the gla.s.s as she peered out at a distorted image of the Sands Motel.

She thought of Danny and of their wedding day, of how handsome he had been in his dress uniform. So tall and strong. So desirable. She remembered how hard it had rained at his funeral, and how the American flag draped over the casket had gotten wet, and how she'd been concerned after hearing of an incident where a wet lowering strap had snapped, allowing the coffin to fall into the grave where the lid broke loose and exposed the body to the entire a.s.sembly.

She gripped the wheel tightly, fighting the urge to scream, then shook the disturbing image out of her mind.

You can drive away, she thought desperately. You can start the d.a.m.n car and drive away.

Go ahead, Ashley, a second voice countered, drive on out of here. But don't say I didn't warn you when you fall asleep at the wheel and kill yourself.

She reached across the seat and grabbed the two shopping bags and stepped out of the car into the rain again. Then she hobbled the short distance to Room 107.

The first to a.s.sault Ashley's senses, the eye-watering odor a as if someone had dumped a truckload of rotting cabbage in the room and sealed it shut for ten years. She switched to mouth breathing and wished she had purchased some surgeon's gloves back at the drug store.

All around her, flower patterned wallpaper blistered and peeled from the crumbling plaster like a severe case of motel eczema. Discolored carpeting in front of the TV betrayed the likely truth that something had died there in recent months. Jammed against one wall, a small bed, its lumpy spread a montage of stains. Above it, an oil-on-black-velvet matador, its fuzzy texture (and most of the sequins adorning the cape) long since rubbed off. From a shelf, a dusty oscillating fan wheezed back and forth, ruffling her wet hair in a vain attempt to cool the air, its gear-drive skipping and jumping, each erratic sweep of the room likely to be its last.

She flopped the large plastic shopping bag on the bed; then from the smaller bag, she removed a half-full quart of grape juice, a half-eaten box of crackers, and a pint of gin, and set them on the night table along with her car keys, credit card and phone. She dumped the contents of the other bag out onto the bed: a lavender faux-suede jacket; a sundress; a white bra and three pairs of panties; a men's white undershirt and pair of boxer shorts (make-shift pajamas, like the ones she used to borrow from Danny); miscellaneous toiletries, pills, and makeup accessories; a simple necklace; and a pair of low heels. She draped the jacket over a chair and smoothed the wrinkles out of the new sundress.

She walked over to a vanity mirror with half of its silvered gla.s.s falling from the frame, and as she ran a brush through her hair she regarded a strange reflection with its Pica.s.soesque interpretation of her tired eyes. The bruise under her right eye was getting darker, and she cringed at that frightening memory.

She smoothed her cheeks with her hands and sighed. Her youth was slipping away a falling through her fingers like a handful of rose petals. I'll continue to feel young, she thought. I know I will. I always have. But one day the world will take a vote and decide that I'm old. But tonight she didn't feel young at all. Tonight she felt very old.